


dive on in, sweetheart

by pvwork



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Betrayal, F/M, Insanity, Minor Character Death, Underage Drinking, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 17:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvwork/pseuds/pvwork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ophelia grows up a little, and then falls down a lot. There's a love story waiting to be told somewhere between those two moments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dive on in, sweetheart

_I wave a few bottles, then I watch 'em all flock,_  
 _All the girls wanna play Baywatch._  
 _I got a swimming pool full of liquor and they dive in it._  
 _Pool full of liquor, Imma dive in it._

*

Ophelia met him at a party. It's the same way so many other stories start. But this one was hers, so the beginning was still fresh and the ending of a hazy quality initially glazed with hope.

"You look familiar. Do I know you?" He said and she had smiled up at him, the red Solo cup in her hand momentarily forgotten in favor of taking in an eyeful of his smile.

"I'm Ophelia," she said, standing and offering a hand. He took it and his grip was solid, but he still looked perplexed. "Laertes' little sister," she added. He raised both eyebrows in surprise and released her hand just a beat too late.

"I'm Hamlet. It's nice to meet you."

She liked his voice, how low it was and how his smile made his eyes curve into pleased half moons. He was not as stocky as some of the other boys at the party, but he had strong shoulders and veins that traced tantalizing paths along his forearm (that she wanted to follow with her tongue)

"Birthday boy? Well, I hope you can drive because you might have to take up the mantel of designated driver. Everyone is aiming to get him to black out."

"I'll bet," she muttered into her drink.

"It's just their way of showing they care," he said. And she'd grinned at him carefully as people walked through the distance separating them. She lingered at the entrance to the living room long after he'd left, and watched her brother's many friends raise their cups to his health, happiness, and longevity.

 

*

She might or might not be getting a little tipsy, because there is an ache behind her eyes and everything is so terribly, terribly funny.

The stark white walls with holes like gapping mouths revealing colorful wires and pink insulation look less threatening now. The speakers are blaring some loud song about big bootie bitches in honor of her brother's special day, and the booming bass is creeping into her ribs, into her bones, making her heart speed up and skip beats.

Two bare fluorescent bulbs swing from the ceiling, filtering every image with sepia. The carpet is soft but worn under her bare feet. She laughs at a dick joke someone on her left makes. She never knew she liked dick jokes so much.

"So where do you go to school?" Hamlet says as he slides down the wall to sit by her side. He might be tipsy too. A drinking game just broke up when Rosaline drank everyone under the table and still managed to bounce a ping pong ball into a stack of cups as tall as a small dog on its hind legs. Ophelia giggles.

"I'm planning on going to college at NYU in the fall."

"Oh no," he says. And she thinks he's going to be like the last boy who sat down to talk with her an hour or so ago. Once he'd heard she was not yet eighteen (for another four months), he had scooted away slowly as if there was nothing left to say. "You're not going to Boston University? You should know that that's where it's at. It is literally where all the good things are."

"Um. This is my first time drinking, so, I don't know, I'm kind of convince that all the good things are here." She just barely gets the words out from around her laughter because he looked so earnest when trying to sell his school to a buyer that, honestly, had no buying power. She puts both her hands over her mouth and clamps her phone tight between her knees. Hamlet is so, so funny.

He looks amused and she watches the curve of his lips and she thinks that she is totally ready to have her first kiss, but the thought kind of fizzles and dissolves as if dipped in acid because she suddenly realizes that she'd never found a boy she's wanted to kiss before. Hamlet has very thin lips, and a beaky nose. He's wearing black socks with white pants. Who does that?

It feels like they talk for a long time. He sits next to her and talks about his family and his future and his truly awful sleeping habits. She can't help but put her second--no, thir--fourth drink down by her side to better illustrate her points with her hands. She almost regrets how chipped her nail polish is. He must think that she is an insipid little girl.

When she looks at the way he smiles, she wants to lean into him. The room is growing colder, and she takes a sip to sooth her parched tongue. She doesn't see him watch her lick the rim of her cup to get the last of the Jolly Rancher sweetness from the plastic.

*

She'd never been heartsick before. There were stories about these things, but she'd never really paid too much attention to lies like those.

It's not a burn or an ache. It's an itch. It annoyed her in the morning when she brushed her teeth and mused over how thin his lips were, the way they curved when he smiled.

It's a bothersome thing, the little memory of the way he shook his head obstinately and threw the last ping pong ball knowing very well he would miss. His image was in her mind's eye as she sat in her room with the summer sun streaming in and overlaying her legs with stripes of shadow and light. He had smelled sweet like the chaser he drank.

His laugh followed her into a cafe where phantom echoes made her turn her head to try and find a glimpse of him in the buzzing crowd.

There have been other boys she crushed on and they had made her heart hurt and butterflies flutter in her belly but none of them had stuck to her, constantly at the edges of her senses like Hamlet had. He's older than her by a few years and she liked that about him. She liked that he had something offer her in terms of knowledge. She liked how mature he made her feel too.

*

This next part she is not very proud of, but every story must have a middle and hers begins when she begs his number off of her brother.

"For college," she says, "maybe I will want to go to Boston University for graduate school and try to get a master's of public health. He's a good connection to have."

It starts out on her part with a: hello! this is ophelia, i had some question sabout BU i was hoping you could answer.

And ends on his part (many texts later) with: to me you are polaris. a guiding light in the dark sky. i wouldn't know what todo w/o you by my side because you keep my sane and whole and you make me happy. how did i manage all those years without having heard your laugh or seen the moonlight shine in your deep dark eyes i'll never know. but i know that i need you now and always.

When he kissed her for the first time the moon had already come out although the sun had not yet set. She relished in his warmth, loved the way he curled his fingers around the nape of her neck to draw her closer, tilted her head so that when he kissed her deeply their mingled breath clung to their cheeks like a vapor, a veil. She tried to keep up, tried to match him move for move.

She finds herself happy, euphoric, in his presence and she seeks him out often. He make her heart do the electric twist.

Once, he parked his red Mercedes SL550 three blocks away from her house at one in the morning and threw stones at her window until she saw him down in the front lawn below. She'd dressed hurriedly and just managed to remember to grab her house keys before rushing down to greet him with a kiss. While they walked slowly to his car she asked the question pressing on her mind.

"Why didn't you just text me?"

"I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted it to be spontaneous and romantic and kind of dumb. You've never done something like sneak out before, right? So it was, like, a chance for you to be the secret agent you never got to be. "

She feels like Rapunzel when she is riding shotgun, the quiet hum of the car engine drowned out by a thumping beat and the words "and had a really, really, really good time" drowning out her concern about what her father will think when she doesn't come back tomorrow morning.

*

Hamlet belches loudly. The gurgling sound is followed by Ophelia's own somewhat less impressive burp.

From around their smoothies, a Neapolitan for her and chocolate for him, they talk the night away. The stars shift over their heads but they're just two lovers whiling away all the time in the world.

"Would you go to grad school?" Ophelia asks.

"I don't know," Hamlet says, pausing thoughtfully to take a bite of apple pie. "I would want to travel more, but chances are I might have to stay home because things are getting a little rough in my father's business and he might want me to help out."

"Oh. Yeah, that makes sense."

The future is a blurry mirage in the distance to Ophelia. She wouldn't want to see it come any closer ever, she wants to hit pause and let everything in this moment saturate her whole life, take up spans of her timeline with just Hamlet's presence and the overly sweet warmth of the diner they are sitting in.

The tiles squeak under her feet as she slides her sandaled feet forward to touch his leg. His answering smile is sweet as pie and she blinks and smiles in return, so happy to have him in her life and twining his fingers with hers.

*

He changes after his father's death. He tells her that he has chosen to "reveal to her" he is actually a prince. His texts are erratic and strange and she's scared for him.

She never knew that her father was playing advisor to one of the city's most notorious narcotics kingpins.

Should have known, something in her whispers. She's just shy of eighteen. Her father drags her to see Claudius (to face Gertrude) anyway. And he reads out text after text in front of the imposing redwood table Claudius has set up in his lush study (a study in luxury). She tries not to cry, pretends not to be mortified even as her father reads the most personal words she has ever written to another human being.

"You live under my roof, so you live by my rules," Polonius said.

She had looked away, like she is doing now, eyes glancing and darting like a nervous hummingbird, nowhere safe to alight for even a moments rest.

Now, she is sitting in a beautiful dais. A choice seat for avid theater-goers. Hamlet is at her side. The theater is uncomfortable and she sits still as death as his warm breath brushes the shell of her ear, soft, even though the cruel and crude words he subjects her too are anything but gentle. Players pose and perform before her, but she's the one who feels the most kinship with ragged dolls.

*

Like a glazed donut, she thinks to herself as she sits very quietly. Their relationship had been the equivalent of a glazed donut. Sweet and alluring on the outside, but after the first few bites the realization that there is very little substance to such a sugary pastry sets in and, unsatisfied, the stomach allows hunger to rear its head.

Hunger is ugly, gross with greed and in possession of a gapping mouth that leads to a darkness beyond anything Ophelia is familiar with personally.

He never loved her. He fucked her and said the three words she had always wanted to hear, told her she was a pure light in this dark time of his life. He was so many firsts, and she had been so happy he was.

Except.

Ten minutes ago she watched him drag her father's body down the very flight of stair she's now sitting at the foot of.

He'd growled at her, mean and vicious. She had cried when she saw that Death had laid a fine veil over her father, woven so carefully that even at the end of her father's existence there was a semblance of his previous life to his figure, his expression.

In a few days time Hamlet will confront her. Accuse her. Yell at her and then throw her away, this time with a finality that has her shattering into pieces as if she weren't wholly there to begin with.

Her brother will be away at school, but he will return in a few weeks time.

She will sing for him. She will sing for them all when the time comes. The end of her story approaches, almost like an accident waiting to happen.

**Author's Note:**

> I realize there are some tense changes between each section. Those were just for fun on my part. I also realize the beginning takes up a disproportionate part of this whole story, and that's because the end is just too darn depressing. The lyrics are Kendrick Lamar's "Swimming Pool".


End file.
